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Hi, I'm Rachel! I'm a professional writer and editor based in Brooklyn. The Rewm is where I share my work, my favorite things from around the web, and the things that keep me busy when I'm not at work.

Feminism, food, and the "new domesticity"

April 30, 2013

I started listening to the audiobook version of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us on my drive to work yesterday. Early on in the first chapter (read a fantastic except here), author Michael Moss said something about how processed/convenience foods were not meant to be consumed all the time, but (and I’m badly paraphrasing here) our modern lifestyles have led to us relying on them more than ever in the past few decades. When he said that, my first thought was, Hm, and what changed about our lifestyles in the past few decades? And my second thought was, Well, many households went from a single breadwinner to having two people working, something that would probably make convenience food both more attractive and more affordable. And so for the rest of my drive, I was thinking about how (middle and upper class) women’s liberation from the kitchen may have had an effect on the way we eat.

Coincidentally, later in the afternoon, I came across Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? on Salon and then a response (No, Feminism Isn’t Making America Fat) on Jezebel. Two articles which were responding to the fact that apparently, I wasn’t the only one to wonder about these things — though I got the impression from these articles that even pondering these ideas was the same as blaming feminism.

The Salon article, despite its inflammatory title, is actually a really good read. The author, Emily Matchar, has a book coming out next week that I remember hearing about a few months ago and then promptly forgetting about: Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. Similar to Radical Homemakers, Homeward Bound takes a look at the women who see mastering the domestic arts as their way of subverting the patriarchy. These women are “femivores.”

“In 2010, writer Peggy Orenstein coined the term ‘femivore’ to describe a certain breed of stay-at-home mom whose commitment to providing the purest, most sustainable foods has become a full-fledged raison d’être. These are the women who raise backyard chickens, grow their own vegetables for their children’s salads, join raw-milk clubs to get illegal-but-allegedly-wholesome unpasteurized milk.

‘Femivore’ is an infelicitous-sounding term (do they eat women?!) but an on-target concept. Femivores, Orenstein says, use food as ‘an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.’”

…’The return to domesticity by young, intelligent, educated women like you see around here is a reaction against a broken food system in America,’ says Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on food culture. ‘We’ve lost our connection to traditional handmade cuisine, kids could have shorter life spans than their parents [because of obesity and poor diet], there’s global warming. This new food culture is a response to an industrial model that’s not working.’

Our country is clearly in a dire state when it comes to obesity and the environmental impact of factory farming, so the fact that more people care about food is terrific. But the kitchen’s always been a fraught place when it comes to gender and class, and the twenty-first century is shaping up to be no different. For some, the new cooking culture is incredibly empowering. Others are finding themselves tied up in apron strings all over again.”

It’s interesting to me that so many people (including the author of the Jezebel article) consider women who are growing/cooking/raising their own food as smug, clueless, and regressive because that’s the complete opposite impression I’ve gotten from Radical Homemakers thus far. That book argues (and I’m really simplifying it here) that instead of relying on a man, modern women now rely on The Man — that is, to be independent from male partners, we are just dependent on our employers who, we all know, do not always have our best interests at heart. And to work as much as we do, we rely on cheap convenience products that are bad for our health and the environment and are often made by low-wage workers. According to the book, radical homemakers:

“are not the brand of feminists seeking security through economic independence…in most cases, they view ‘economic independence’ as an imaginary condition; if a wife, say is reliant upon her husband’s paycheck, he, in turn, is dependent upon the vicissitudes or even the whims of his employer. They are both vulnerable if their life skills are limited to what they can do for a paycheck. They are more stable if the paycheck is only a small percentage of the livelihood, and life skills, increased self-reliance, community, and family networks supply the rest…these homemakers have evolved a more sophisticated view of what constitutes an economy and they have surrendered a false sense of independence to embrace genuine interdependence.

…it is only natural that many feminists, working in the context of a power struggle between the sexes, suggest that the only way to achieve equality is to exit the home. The trouble is, however, that everyone still needs a home…the power struggle that is alleviated when both husband and wife become working professionals is merely transferred to someone lower on the social ladder.

For there to be true social egalitarianism, then the work of keeping a home must be valued for its contribution of the welfare to all.”

And Radical Homemakers really does value the work of creating a home. It argues that we dismiss what has historically been considered “women’s work” as unimportant because of its association with women (and, perhaps more important, its association with poor women and women of color) when in reality, mastering the domestic arts actually has a lot of value on a personal, community, and large social and political level. The book isn’t arguing that women stay home to perfectly clean houses, organize playgroups for their kids, and make baby food from scratch while their husbands go off to work; it’s pushing families to become units of production (raising/growing/making their own food, sewing their own clothes, trading skills and homemade goods with other families, etc.) instead of units of consumption. To use a really simple example, most of us now our buy bread rather than making it making it ourselves. It would probably be cheaper and healthier to make it ourselves, so why don’t we? Because we don’t have time. Why don’t we have time? Because we have to go to work. Why do we have to go to work? Because we need to pay for our homes and cars. Why do we need two cars per family? So we can go to work. To pay for our bread. And all the other things we need to buy to offset the fact that we’re working so much and don’t have time to produce anything for ourselves. So maybe we should spend more time making our own bread so we don’t have to work in shitty conditions so that we can pay someone else (who is also working in shitty conditions) to do it for us. (I know I’m not doing this book’s arguments justice; if you’re interested in this topic, I really recommend reading it!)

The book really is pretty radical but I’m into it, and I’ve been waiting for some media coverage of this topic that doesn’t reduce all the women who are going this route to sanctimonious, out-of-touch, upper-middle-class white women. (I had high hopes when I saw the NY Mag cover story “The Feminist Housewife” a couple months ago but was sorely disappointed upon reading it.) Matchar’s article in Salon gets closer (and includes a lot of great info/history on this topic that has me eager to read her book), but then there’s that title.

So, what does Michael Pollan have to do with this? Is he really a sexist pig?

Matchar uses Pollan as an example of someone who is pushing this return to cooking, canning, and growing your own food because he’s sexist and regressive. She takes one of his quotes from 2009 out of context to make it sound like he’s blaming women and feminists for the way our country eats. But I’ve always felt that Pollan (who I was praising last week) really gets all of the issues that intersect when we talk about food. So I read the article Matchar (and, later, Jezebel) quoted, in which he allegedly “scolds that ‘American women now allow corporations to cook for them’ and rues the fact that women have lost the ‘moral obligation to cook’ they felt during his 1960s childhood” and…I’m not seeing that attitude at all. He actually makes a pretty great case for why modern cooking shows get it wrong in how they portray women cooking.

“These shows stress quick results, shortcuts and superconvenience but never the sort of pleasure — physical and mental — that Julia Child took in the work of cooking: the tomahawking of a fish skeleton or the chopping of an onion, the Rolfing of butter into the breast of a raw chicken or the vigorous whisking of heavy cream. By the end of the potato show, Julia was out of breath and had broken a sweat, which she mopped from her brow with a paper towel. (Have you ever seen Martha Stewart break a sweat? Pant? If so, you know her a lot better than the rest of us.) Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles. You didn’t do it to please a husband or impress guests; you did it to please yourself. No one cooking on television today gives the impression that they enjoy the actual work quite as much as Julia Child did. In this, she strikes me as a more liberated figure than many of the women who have followed her on television…Julia never referred to her viewers as ‘housewives’ — a word she detested — and never condescended to them. She tried to show the sort of women who read The Feminine Mystique that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.)”

“We kind of assume that women went back to work and there was no time to make a family meal. But it isn’t that simple and it’s a lot more interesting. The corporations were knocking on that door for almost 100 years. And after World War II, when they had invented all these technologies for processing food and making it shelf stable and simulating real foods with fake foods, they really pushed. And they found their opportunity with the feminist revolution beginning in the ’70s. There was this really uncomfortable conversation taking place at kitchen tables all across America. Men and women were trying to renegotiate the division of labor in the household. And then the food industry recognized they had an opportunity. And they said ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ve got you covered. We’ll do the cooking.’ And KFC even took out a billboard with a big bucket of fried chicken and the slogan, ‘Women’s Liberation.’

So I really think we need to go back and finish that difficult conversation. And I’ve had it, you know, with my wife, over who does what in the house, and bring men back into the kitchen. And children, which I think is really, really important…I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook.”

I don’t get the impression that he thinks women or feminism are the problem…it sounds like he thinks KFC is the damn problem. And I think a lot of these “new domestic” women are pushing back against KFC and the like, not against feminism or working women. Sure, the Salon article may be using white, upper-middle-class stay-at-home moms as their example of this new type of homemaker and subtly hint that what they are doing is silly or just the latest trendy thing to do (and the so-called “mommy wars” add a whole other layer to this) but the women in Radical Homemakers are…grittier (for lack of a better term) that the Salon article makes them out to be. (Though the media always makes a point to say that the “new housewife” has tattoos and dyes her hair fun colors; I’m not sure if they think this makes her grittier, or if they are implying that tattoos are just the 2013 version of Betty Draper’s circle skirts.) The radical homemakers care deeply about social justice, the environment, their health, and about many of the seriously broken parts of our culture and economy. So is the fact that they choose the kitchen as their place to protest what makes people uncomfortable? Is it the fact that “women’s work” and “women’s interests” are still treated as fluffy and dismissed by a lot of people? (The argument “if it’s so great, then why aren’t men doing it?” is often used in discussions like this, I guess to prove that if men aren’t doing something, then it’s…not a smart, savvy, and worthwhile thing to be doing?) Is it that we interpret this as something that is only available to the privileged, ergo it must be bullshit? Is it that we struggle to imagine that something that was historically gendered could actually be a form of liberation?

I’m not entirely sure why people are giving a side-eye to these radical homemakers and new domestics, but I hope that as Homeward Bound hits shelves/Kindles next week, the media gives a bit more in-depth coverage to this topic and to the women (and men, and single people, and people without kids) who realize that cooking healthy, locally-grown whole foods for yourself and the people you care about has value (even when you do it in a small way — I mean, I don’t grow and can my own vegetables but I’ve been going to the farmers market regularly since reading Radical Homemakers because that seems like a good start for now) and that spending more time in the kitchen might not come from a desire to return to the 1950s, but instead from a desire to send a big “fuck you” to a lot of systems that really need some fucking up.

31 comments

I was going to post about this article, but now I think I’ll just link to yours. I’m also going to read Radical Homemakers. I’m a (newly) married lady who cooks from scratch, brews beer, keeps chickens and bees, and has a garden, but I’m also a big time feminist. Sometimes I wonder how to reconcile these things, but most of the time I just get angry about the fact that I feel like I *have* to reconcile them.

I do like the idea that we’re not going back to the 1950s, but that we’re rejecting the current paradigm. That’s way more bad ass, and more in line with my beliefs.

Such great articles to quote and great points here! This is a really interesting and thought provoking topic and I love how many different ways you can approach it. I’m sure Mr. Pollan will be issuing a press release but as we all know it’s not “acceptable” for public figures to claim they’re feminists these days so I’m sure it’ll be wishy washy.

I’m ALL for cooking from scratch, keeping a clean house, and getting back to basics. But I’m also all for ALL members of the household doing just that. In my relationship I make the money, I make the purchases, and he takes care of more domestic concerns. I don’t think this arrangement comes from me being a feminist or pushing a feminist agenda (though I would happily title myself as a modern feminist), it’s just how things work out. And looking back I don’t think we’d be where we were today if I wasn’t such a strong, ambitious woman – Those characteristics make me great at my job, but they also make me a great partner.

And for the record – I LOVE to cook and wish I had more time to do so. Baking too. Cleaning too. But in our modern world you have to choose your battles and make decisions – I’d rather climb the corporate ladder and hire cleaners than cut my hours & spend more time on my apartment. That’s my choice and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to make that choice.

I just added a new book to my “does the library have this and if not can I inter-library loan it?” list.

I loved Radical Homemakers. I think there’s a good point in all of these articles. We are trying to move more toward a household of production than consumption, but it can be hard. We live in a very urban area and aren’t zoned for chickens. We picked our neighborhood because of it’s walk score, and we are trying to grow a small garden. We just need it to stop frosting overnight.

I loved Radical Homemakers. My husband and I both read it. Actually, I think he bought it. << Proof that not only women are interested in radical homemaking! The concept that we rely on convenience foods because we're so busy working to make the money to support our busy lifestyle really hit home for both of us.

I understand that homemaking is a historically gendered task, but I think at this point, we as a culture need to let go of our insistence that homemaking is a feminist issue. To me, "homemaking" is about meeting basic human necessities–food, shelter, clothing, basic sanitation. Those are not WOMEN's needs or women's tasks but PEOPLE's needs and people's tasks. Everybody needs it and everyone can do it. I wish we could learn to reframe the discussion. (But I don't think most people are ready for that, because as Pollan said, "we need to go back and finish that difficult conversation.")

THIS is why I read this blog. My mom was a “stay at home mom”, and people are always flabbergasted and ask me what she does all day. She is a radical homemaker. She gardens, cans, makes all the family’s food from scratch, sews, and yes, cleans to keep the very busy house from falling apart, and on top of that she has taught my family about how to be productive, kind members of society. When my dad’s business falters, its not as difficult for my family, because her hard work produces our families food so that we don’t have to be heavy consumers.

She ENJOYS this work, she loves seeing the results of her labor, aesthetically in the home, and in her healthy children. The most difficult thing for her is the judgement that others cast on her for her decisions.

ALSO- I have to add, that as a historian, I am faced all the time with historical situations where the “Egg and Milk” money or “women’s money” were what the family lived on when jobs were scarce.

Gardening and keeping chickens become crucial to life during hard economic times, we become less reliant on the government and big business to take care of us. In today’s economic situation, we ALL, men and women alike, need to know how to do basic things in order to survive.

THIS. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this as well, and I’ve wrestled with these very issues for years. I’m very much a feminist, but the fact is that I love all things domestic — and I get a lot of satisfaction from them as well.

I completely agree with your take on the Jezebel article and Michael Pollan’s statemtents, too. I have a love/hate relationship with Jezebel; I love some of the fallacies and double standards they point out, but there are other times when I feel like they’re taking things out of context in order to generate outrage. I also really like an respect Michael Pollan, and I feel like he’s one of the more thoughtful, pragmatic, and intelligent authors on anything related to current affairs — and after reading almost all his books, I never got the impression that he was even remotely sexist.

Thank you for writing another fantastically thoughtful, articulate, and insightful piece!

I think a lot of feminists our age struggle with that and I wonder why/where/how we got the message that “women’s work” was so bad. I feel like that’s something that we need to work on with the next generation of boys and girls. Being able to take care of yourself is awesome and empowering!

Also, I, too, have a love-hate relationship with Jezebel, and I’ve been reading it less and less lately for the same reasons you list here. I really like a couple of authors who do a great job of calling bullshit on things that need to be called out and I stick to their articles, because so much of the site is just needlessly trollish and over-the-top. I tend to skim it to find interesting news stories, but I find that if they are responding to an article or something else, you kinda have to go back to the source for yourself because so often things are taken way out of context. This was a perfect example!

I was curious what you thought about all of this because, from what I know about you, you seem like a radical homemaker in a lot of ways! But I’m also kinda glad to know you kind of DON’T think about it because you have better things to do and because you’re confident in your choices.

I think I’m at a stage in life where I can have opinions about this subject but don’t feel ready to talk about them quite yet because I’m still figuring so much out in terms of how my independent life will run and work.

But the first thing I did after reading this post was start googling local farmer’s markets. And now I’m really excited.

Such a great review of books and such, Rachel. I can only imagine the total time you spent reading everything and putting your thoughts into words. I really appreciate it. You’ve given me some great titles to add to my library list and reading list. As an RD, mom, and a human (therefore interested in history, social justice, women’s roles, men’s roles. WHATEVER!) and, well, an anthropology major from back in the day I am thrilled by all the exciting topics in this post.

I am a feminist and I can say with certainty that if my financial situation allowed it I would absolutely be a home maker. I don’t even have children and I am already exploring how I could cut down to 4 days a week from my full time job. For a 3 year period in my life my husband and I found ourselves in the financial situation where I could be a home maker and I can assure you we were never both as happy and healthy as in that period. It has nothing to do with the woman staying at home and the man going out to work – the next time perhaps it will be my job that allows us the opportunity and it will be my husband that is the home maker and me that works outside the home. As a feminist I dont feel the need to defend what has traditionally been seen as women’s work – child minding, home making, caring for elderly relatives – all those are nobel endeavors which all the women (and sometimes the men) in my family have done at times in their lives.

If someone wants to hint that I am somehow less of a feminist or bowing to The Man because my husband and I decide, as a family unit, that I will focus on tasks inside the home rather than outside the home, then I would not waste my breath discussing it with them.

I am a feminist, and I absolutely LOVE domestic tasks. Quite frankly, I don’t feel the need to justify that I love cooking and cleaning, just like I don’t feel the need to justify liking make up and strip-clubs. However, my issue with talking about feminism and home making is that at this point, it is very much an upper-middle class issue. The idea of working less, so that one can consume less is awesome, but it can only really apply to those who can afford to be consumers in the first place. I don’t know. The whole issue is so complex. Sometimes it feels like the discourse on feminism applies only to a certain class, especially when food politics are brought into it.

Very interesting, having read In Defense of Food I’d understood Michael Pollan to be interested in the whys and wherefores of the industrialisation of food by the food industry, not as a result of women’s liberation, but it’s interesting to see that interpretation, it’s not one I’ve seen this side of the Atlantic (UK). Another blog worth reading on the subject of the de-industrialisation of food and how to eat more local and more healthily is Word of Wisdom Living (I’m not Mormon nor even Christian and the sometimes religious undertones/overtones don’t bother me, it’s based just as much on science).

This is one of the best posts I have ever read. I haven’t gone through all of the links you posted yet (opened them all in new tabs so that I wouldn’t miss one!), but I had to comment (for the first time!) and let you know how much I enjoy your writing and coverage of this topic. It’s definitely thought-provoking, but such a good point…… Why is domesticity considered anti-feminism? It is the lack of choice that makes it so, and I sure wish I took the time to cook real meals more often and that my boyfriend and I ate less of those meals in front of the TV. We have very sad abandoned-looking dining room tables…..

I was going to order pizza tonight …. but I think I’ll be heading over to whole foods instead

Thanks for the inspiration and great thoughts to mull over! I may have to pick up that book as well….

Thanks for highlighting this Rachel, one of the reasons I love your blog!

I have really gotten into eating local, cooking more from scratch, etc since moving to Austin last year after living on mostly convenience foods in college and post-college.

However I actually have been much more exposed to the VERY conservative/right-leaning/religious-based version of being a homemaker. The women writing these “real food” blogs as they are often referred to (they take a lot of their cues and methods from the Weston a Price foundation as well as the cookbook Nourishing Traditions (a cookbook I own and enjoy and it is also pretty accessible for recipes) by Sally Fallon. They are more often then not members of either conservative Catholic or evangelical traditions. It is a bit disconcerting at times really. But I go to those blogs for their recipes, not for their ideology (I’m more Unitarian Universalist these days).

All of this to say, THANK YOU for reminding me of the more “modern” women homemakers today. Very inspiring and encouraging! Kate Payne who wrote The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking (she’s based here in Austin) has a great book on just cleaning and being sensible about taking care of your domestic space (a task that should be shared by both men and women, in my opinion)

I just finished Homeward Bound and there is an entire chapter about the religious aspect of this and it was SO interesting to me! I will write more about this in a post about the book next week, but basically, the author was saying that this approach actually seems to unite super-right-wing and super-crunchy-lefty types. I honestly think that’s kind of awesome! But yeah, it’s nice to see that this “homemaker movement” is a lot more diverse than it might appear at first!

Great article and really thought provoking. This reminded me of the exhibit that I saw in May at the American History Museum in Washington, DC on American Food and how it has evolved from the 1950’s to the present. Women’s lib and immigration are noted for their contributions. I walked through the exhibit with my mother who remarked that it was weird seeing the things she grew up with and the life she knew as a child in the 1950’s in a museum. And she remembered the creation of fast food, TV dinners, the microwave, all of it. Very interesting exhibit that I would recommend you check out. http://americanhistory.si.edu/food-introduction.

I am a feminist. I actually have a job in feminist work. I work mainly with women around employment issues. I’m not sure I’ll ever be unable to feel some anxiety when I see women drop completely out of the traditional workforce. Not because rah-rah everyone should work for the corporate machine, but because dropping out of the workforce makes it harder to break back in. So should the unthinkable happen and your partner passes, or you part ways, or their job shuts down- the challenges are greater when one partner is not marketable in the workforce.

HOWEVER, I am also completely disturbed by the food industry and big pharma. I in no way think that homesteading or radical homemaking is a return to the 50’s. I think its something a bit different. I heard a (mostly boring) lecture the other day about building communities around agriculture and how many people dream of a fake idyllic agrarian past. The speaker encouraged listeners not to wish for the past but to help build a future with a robust agricultural component.

Where we are with this stuff is complicated. Between work and graduate school I often lose sleep, miss exercise, and cannot eat the meals I need to (I have a chronic disease that requires a special diet). In many ways I am working my body into the ground. Its truly unfortunate. I hope I learn some balance soon! I can see the appeal of dropping out of the debt accruing money making (I don’t make much money anyway) machine and keeping some bees and making some fresh mozzarella. In other words… even though I am a feminist who believes its not only important that women have the power to choose but that they choose power, I do get it.

I also don’t like any system or idea that keeps women in the private sphere. If women are more likely to homestead because they’re husbands are more likely to earn more (at least 23% more) then I think its important that they stay engaged in some meaningful way. We need women in power. We also need families and people at home making sure we don’t all die when we’re 45 because we only eat stuff that’s made of corn remnants and salt.